A Study Of Culture Teaching In College English Teaching From Aspect Of Translation Error Analysis

Culture and cultural studies are important issues of contemporary foreign language education (FLE) research. Foreign language study is actually culture study. Neither learners' communicative capacity nor their culture attainment can be isolated from the comprehension of the target language. Culture teaching should be integrated into language teaching. However, it must be pointed out that many theoretical explorations in the field of cultural studies in the past decades are not applied appropriately into actual teaching and learning practice. In College English teaching for non-English majors, it is common to see teachers busying themselves either imparting language points to leamers or developing leamers' language skills, with the only expectation of a higher pass rate of College English Test (CET) Band 4 and Band 6. Culture is largely overshadowed by this over-obsession of language.The author holds that translation can comprehensively reflect the students' language proficiency. Translation here refers to the translating performance of leamers' communicative ability rather than their awareness of translation theory. It is a proper transference from the native language to the target language, which requires the language learners to use their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills integrativly and comprehend the target culture thoroughly. While college students' language proficiency is far from satisfaction. The author carries out a case study on translation exercise in Qingdao University of Science and Technology. The subjects are the second-year non-English majors. After two years' college English study the students are expected to have a liquid English foundation. However, a number of errors are committed in the learners' translation assignments. The data collected are analyzed by SPSS. The result reveals the absence of leamers' cross-culture awareness and their ignorance of culture learning. Most of the leamers tend to blend their Chinese ways of thinking and expressions into English patterns, which leads to some typical pragmatic failures. When the leamers' inner native culture awareness bumped with the target culture, obstacles are inevitably emerged. Culture difference influences learners' language proficiency and challenges CTE. What is the role of culture in FLE? Is it merely a supplement to learners' linguistic proficiency or does it have more profound significance? What is the current situation of cultural studies in College English teaching and learning (CETL) process? To answer these questions, a survey is conducted which covers three important dimensions: coursebook, teacher and learner. The data collected is processed in SPSS which indicates that the situation of culture teaching in CETL is not optimistic. Most of the learners and teacher are not fully aware of the impartibility of culture and language learning. The situation of culture teaching needs to be improved urgently.The author offers some tentative suggestions as how to better incorporate culture studies into language studies in CETL. First and foremost, the thesis calls for a full awareness of the values and significance of studying culture in FLE and CETL. As regards teaching contents, it argues that an-embracing view of culture is needed. Also, it suggests a question-guided approach to classroom instruction and makes full use of the visual-audio aids so that the focus of study could shift from isolated linguistic knowledge to overall culture. Furthermore, the integration of culture teaching and language skill training can help the learners to realize the diversities of languages and broaden their visions. Moreover, leamers' culture attainment can be improved, which help them to achieve better prospects.The dissertation consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introductory part, covering the purpose of the present research and the framework of the thesis. Chapter 2 is theoretical study of the significance of cultural studies in FLE. It begins with the discussion of objectives of FLE and concludes that there are two major objectives of FLE: to learn the language for communication and to learn the language for learners' personal development. Both aims work together to make cultural studies not merely a part of FLE but the actual content and focus of it. The thesis proceeds to look into the relationship between language and culture, further proving that the interwoven relationship between the two makes cultural studies virtually an inevitable part of language leaming. This part is followed by the discussi.on of several practical considerations for stressing cultural studies in FLE. Also in this chapter, the history of culture teaching in language teaching is briefly reviewed and an integration of language studies and cultural studies is proposed by clearing two popular misconceptions.The author illustrates an Error Analysis of learners' translation assignment in Chapter 3. This study reveals that college students' English. proficiency is far from satisfaction. The causation of errors is explored after a series of scientific statistics and analysis. Most of the errors committed by the learners are related with their lacking of culture awareness, which leads to the following survey of the current culture teaching situation.Chapter 4 presents an overall picture of the status quo of cultural studies in CETL through an evaluation of two series of coursebooks and the analyses of two questionnaires: one for language teachers and the other for students. Furthermore, a socio-cultural test is conducted to test learners' knowledge about the target culture and their corresponding socio-cultural competence. The results of this all-round investigation show that culture has not been taken into serious consideration in CETL: coursebooks are language-oriented; teachers and learners on the whole hold a utilitarian view of CETL objective and their exposure to the foreign culture, both first hand and second hand, are actually extremely limited; learners' knowledge of the target cultures and their corresponding socio-cultural competence are shockingly poor.In view of the huge discrepancy between theory and practice, Chapter 5 is devoted to some suggestions to help narrow the gap. Some teaching methods and techniques are covered, including didactic approaches, experimental approaches, wide exposure to the target culture through authentic materials, and exploration of cultural bumps. At end of Chapter 5 the limitation of the present research is mentioned and possible directions for further research are suggested.